Best of Portland 2014: Best Listens

Malcolm Noble is big on firsts. He’ll tell you,
without prompting, the name of the first basketball player ever to
shatter a backboard (Chuck Connors) and where the Fender Stratocaster
made its live debut (Jantzen Beach). His favorite trivia question is
even more obscure: Who is Portland’s first rapper?

Answer: Malcolm Noble.

At least, he’s pretty
sure that’s true. In 1979, Noble and his band, Shock, recorded “Let’s
Get Crackin’,” a boogie-funk jam featuring Noble speaking in simple
rhymes (“This jam is not only nutritious/It can be, to the groovers,
delicious”) over fat-backed synths. It’s about as primeval a form of rap
as one can dig up. Still, according to Noble, no one else in Portland
at the time had attempted anything similar.

“I had a claim I used
to always say: ‘Yeah, you’re doing it now, but I was doing it when it
wasn’t cool,’” says the 58-year-old musician from his apartment in
Northeast Portland. “People were acting like I was talking to myself or
something.”

Noble has spent his
life entrenched in Portland’s R&B scene. He was introduced to
hip-hop via an East Coast acquaintance of his cousin. When it came time
for Shock to go into the studio, he decided to experiment with rap
cadence. “Let’s Get Crackin’,” which appeared on the group’s 1980 album,
Electrophonic Funk, became a minor hit, leading to tours supporting Smokey Robinson, Tower of Power and Tina Turner.

Somewhere along the
line, though, Noble’s pioneer status got, in his words, “lost in the
sauce.” In the ’90s, he tried reasserting his place in Pacific Northwest
history, dubbing himself MC Ol’ Skool and producing tracks for younger
MCs. In 2007, Shock was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame, and
his covers act, Cool Breeze, plays regularly at the Spare Room. And yet
Noble isn’t even sure Terrance “Cool Nutz” Scott, the so-called
“ambassador” of Portland hip-hop and family friend from way back, would
acknowledge his accomplishments.

“I’m just bewildered
and disappointed that no one would ever actually do their research and
find out who’s the guy who actually started this,” he says. “Because if
they did, I have a feeling they’d at least have a stop at my door.”
MATTHEW SINGER.

BESTROCK-’N’-ROLL ANIMAL (CRYPTOZOOLOGICAL DIVISION)

“We need a yeti.” For Black Prairie’s John Moen, hearing
those words from bandmate Chris Funk registered as a challenge. In the
run-up to its new album, the normally placid Portland folk act had begun
exploring its nascent classic-rock influences, to the point of booking a
gig at LaurelThirst under its louder, heavier alias, White Tundra.
It had the riffs and the volume. All the band needed to complete its
transformation into a true Monster of Rock was, well, a monster. Moen,
an aspiring special-effects artist in his younger days, accepted Funk’s
(mostly sarcastic) edict, constructing an 8-foot albino Sasquatch out of
aluminum tubing, insulating foam and fake fur. “Everyone wanted to name
it ‘Eddie the Yeti,’” after Iron Maiden’s demonic mascot, Moen says.
Instead, he christened her “Betty”—a reference to her shifty red “Yeti
Davis eyes,” implanted from a Halloween decoration. The beast made its
live debut at LaurelThirst, looming over the band as it bashed out
Sabbath covers. She then followed Black Prairie into the studio, serving
as a muse for the group’s most amplified album yet, this year’s Fortune.
Alas, Betty was destined to be the Pete Best of homemade mythological
creatures: She’s currently sitting, headless and retired, in Moen’s
garage. He is hopeful for a reunion sometime in the future. Others,
though, would prefer the hairy diva stay mothballed. “Good riddance,”
Funk says. “Frankly, her bad vibes onstage really ruined it for me.”MATTHEW SINGER.

BESTLASER-TAGGED SCORE

Seventy-some years after Woody Guthrie recorded “Grand
Coulee Dam” at a Portland studio, the city has again helped craft an ode
to America’s largest hydroelectric facility. “Woody was trying to sell
the idea of these giant public work projects,” said Mark Orton, a Portland composer best known for scoring 2013 Best Picture Oscar nominee Nebraska. “We’re selling the history of the area through lasers.”

You can hear Orton’s score every evening between Memorial and Labor days at the Grand Coulee Dam (grandcouleedam.com),
85 miles west of Spokane. For the past quarter-century, a laser light
show has been projected on the face of the dam to accompany an
educational film about the Columbia River. As the singular attraction of
a sparsely populated region, the half-hour program long brought
dependable audiences from nearby campgrounds. But the images (2-D
geometric squiggles) and soundtrack (Vangelis, Neil Diamond) had grown
stale over the decades.

The feds tapped Eugene’s LumaLaser, whose specialty illuminations have previously brightened screenings of Disney’s Tron: Legacy
and the Hollywood Bowl, to design the new program “One River, Many
Voices.” Portland documentarian Sue Arbuthnot waded through a gauntlet
of competing interests to arrange a mutually agreeable voice-over, and
her former collaborator Orton put aside cinematic duties—films he’s
slated to score include the Kevin Kline-Kristin Scott Thomas comedy My Old Lady and the animated Laika feature The Boxtrolls—to compose background music for the biggest possible stage. The show debuted May 24.

Beyond the 1,000-seat
concrete bleachers permanently facing the Grand Coulee’s center,
organizers placed a succession of discreetly camouflaged audio
components throughout the area to ensure that the soundtrack would
extend as far as the spectacle could be glimpsed. “Anywhere you can see
this thing, there’s going to be a speaker nearby,” Orton said.“You
pull over to the side of the road and, behind an electrical pole,
they’ll have hung this huge speaker. Sometimes, they’re tiny little ones
up in the corner of a building or on a tree.Some of them are hidden, but not in an insidious way. It’s not like a Big Brother vibe.”

All told, the
production cost the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation just under $2 million.
“You’re building something for the ages,” Orton continued, “not for just
two minutes of the next news cycle. Projecting over a screen that’s one
mile wide is a technical feat. It’s one thing for a laser to sweep
across the planetarium ceiling during ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’To have the spillway of a gigantic dam covered in this multitextured light…that’s a wow.” JAY HORTON.

BESTCRASHING ELEVATOR MUSIC

If you listen to a lot of KBOO, you’re
used to being challenged by the sounds and ideas broadcast from the
anarchic 45-year-old community radio station off East Burnside Street.
Occasionally, things get a little nutty. Rarely, though, are they so
unpleasant as to tempt a click up one frequency to basic-ass OPB.

But two hours of blood-curdling screams, machine-gun bursts and speaker-rattling explosions on KBOO’s oddest program, A Different Nature,
almost got me. Normally, you tune in to the Monday night
“genre-defying avant-garde” music program to hear a little Sun Ra or
Zbigniew Karkowski and maybe a few less-commercial B-sides from Lou
Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Last July, though, it sounded as if Rambo were executing every last man, woman and child in that village from Apocalypse Now.

I called to complain, and was gently chastened.

“We wanted to do a
show of people making love,” said the host, “but the FCC says you can’t
broadcast the sound of people having sex, though apparently violence is
fine so long as there are no curse words, so we said, ‘OK, we’ll play
two hours of fighting—as sort of a commentary on the FCC’s rules.’ Sorry
you’re not enjoying it, we’ll be doing something different next week.”

I shut up, hung up, and suffered another 10 minutes of explosions and screams.MARTIN CIZMAR.

BEST PLACE TO HEAR (AND SEE AND FEEL) MUSIC

You could spend about 15 minutes at CymaSpace (4634B NE Garfield Ave., cymaspace.org)
and still think you’re at any old house show. It is, after all, a
slightly cramped cellar just off Alberta Street, with a couple of cozy
couches, a white shag carpet in lieu of a stage, and crowds that on
packed nights spill out into the backyard vegetable garden. If there
weren’t loud rock playing and 100 people milling around, the place would
basically look like a well-soundproofed version of your own basement.

But then you sit down
on the couch and feel the seat hum with each kick of the bass drum, or
you notice the LED lights lining the ceiling turn purple every time the
singer hits a high note. And wait, is that psychedelic projection on the
wall actually shifting shape with that jagged guitar riff? The answer
is yes: In fact, it’s all connected.

“If I’m no longer
aware of what the visuals are telling me, we’re going in the wrong
direction,” founder Myles de Bastion says. He was born profoundly
deaf—and can now hear only a narrow range of midfrequency sounds—but de
Bastion is an accomplished guitarist, and he dreamed up CymaSpace to
bring the music he loves to his hearing-impaired friends.

Just over a year ago,
de Bastion taught himself electronics from scratch and built an
amp-sized cube that would light up when he played. Then he built a light
rig that matched colors on the light spectrum to sonic
frequencies—violet for highs, red for lows. After that came vibrating
furniture and a light-up drum set. Now, CymaSpace is a truly
multisensory experience: At a recent show, there was even juice served,
color-coded to match the light spectrum of specific songs. The space
claims to be the only venue of its kind in the world.

While it began as a
bridge between the hearing and deaf communities, CymaSpace aims to be
accessible to anyone. Shows are all-ages, and the space has hosted
everything from hip-hop to punk, from poetry readings to tech-geek hack
sessions. “This is a community, and there’s room for everybody,”
co-founder and poet Monica Storss says. “All the arts, all the senses.”TREE PALMEDO.

BEST PUBLIC IPOD MIX

Last month, I was eating lunch at my local McMenamins,
because this is what you do in your 30s—you eat lunch at McMenamins and
come to see it as an indispensable part of your week. And not for the
first time, I noticed the music: an unerringly lilting and comforting
mixtape of Americana, Ryan Adams followed by Emmylou Harris followed by
the Old 97s. But this time I asked who picked the songs. Turns out it’s a
kind of in-house radio station that plays at all 66 of the rehabbed
McMenamins pubs, selected by Dan McMenamin, son of co-founder Mike.
“Sometimes,” my server informed me, “we put in something from after
1983.” Portland’s sole remaining Adult Album Alternative station airs
only inside a chain of bars—dad rock chosen by the son of the company’s
father. AARON MESH.